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Excerpt from: A revised version of the research results I undertook in Vienna between 2008 and 2009 under the project title WORLDWARDS. Artistic Bordercrossers. Contemporary Art of AUST[ria][af]RICA, supervised by
Prof. Dr. Thomas Fillitz, University of Vienna.

Weltwärtige Künstler_wege im Kontext der Diskurse über zeitgenössische Kunst aus Afrika, afrikanische Diaspora und der Globalisierung visueller Kunst. The publication of this research was fully funded and made possible by the
Austrian Research Association (ÖFG).


Bublished:  Lit 2013, under the title:

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Weltwärtige Künstler_wege im Kontext der Diskurse über zeitgenössische Kunst aus Afrika, afrikanische Diaspora und der Globalisierung visueller Kunst. Vienna, Berlin. Art and Visual Cultures

of Africa, Vol. 1.
192 pages
edited by:Kerstin Pinther and Tobias Wendl.


ISBN 978 - 3-643-50476-0

 

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​Abstract

 


The subject of the text WORLDWARDS. Artistic Bordercrossers. Contemporary Art of AUST[ria][af]RICA is the result of an empirically and discursively justified argument concerning contemporary visual art work from different regions of the world with special regard to contemporary African visual art. In the past decades, an increasing interest in contemporary visual art of Africa and the African Diaspora can be noticed within the European and North American art world, for which globalization in visual art, transnational mobility as well as migratory movements of artists from African states are a substantial condition. Crucial changes in the production, distribution, and representation of contemporary African visual art can be noticed, questioning the European-North American universal requirement for hegemony within the global Art World. This contributed to the fact that this art is regarded as an unavoidable transcendental point of reference, as part of a global artistic practice. Any discussion on contemporary artists from Africa and the African Diaspora, who are going global or acting to a certain extent on an international level, must be positioned in the present discourse of globalization on visual art. This text deals with substantial events and phenomena, which are constitutive of the changed cartography of contemporary visual art of Africa and the African Diaspora and contributed to its highly visible presence on a global scale. It is concerned with questions regarding processes of belonging and contributing in a (global) world of art, which is still hegemonically structured and at this stage tries to settle the claim to be postcolonial, postmodern, posthistorical, deterritorialized, international up to transnational and global.
This culture and social anthropological analysis focuses on the artists as social protagonists. What do artists, born in African countries and due to their transnational mobility, presently living and working in Vienna, think about the current discourses on globalization of visual art of the globalization of contemporary African visual art in particular and what strategies are hidden behind their artistic practices? The present text drives from an artist orientated approach, examining the before mentioned questions, with reference to the artists Cheikh Niass, Adesola Adebesin and Mara Serigne Mor Niang.

UNBURY TOMORROW: Against the Normalisation of War is a variable installation
composed of printed micro-essays (multilingual, free for circulation), a portable analogue television
(Tele Star 4004, late 1980s), a telescopic antenna, a white textile, plastic and electricity.

The installation is variable in scale, approximately 250 × 130 × 120 cm.

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UNBURY TOMORROW: against the normalisation of war, constitutes the second public occurrence within
Chimeric Embassy of Cosmic Concerns (2025–2028), a semi-nomadic research project initiated by Mirjam Kroker.
The project unfolds through invitations from institutional, semi-institutional, and independent spaces,
forming temporary assemblies and shared inquiries.

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UNBURY TOMORROW: against the normalisation of war unfolds from the recognition that war is not an exceptional rupture of order, but a recurrent power logic through which order itself is produced and maintained. Historically, war has structured the world through cycles of conquest, destruction, repair, reconstruction, and renewed militarisation. These cycles are reproductive. They generate infrastructures, industries, political vocabularies, and aesthetic regimes that stabilise power while rendering violence necessary, manageable, and legitimate.

Within this logic, war does not need to declare itself. It operates as an atmospheric condition—shaping perception, affect, and time. Its visual languages are deeply sedimented: images of damage, restoration, resilience, and post-conflict repair circulate with strong aesthetic force. Contemporary art and critical practices are not outside this economy; they are often drawn into reproducing its grammars, even when opposing its outcomes.

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UNBURY TOMORROW does not seek to counter this condition with alternative images or representations. Instead, it acknowledges the persistence of this power logic and withdraws from its modes of production. The work refuses the aesthetic operations through which war renders itself intelligible, 'attractive', and culturally operative. The installation consists of multiple elements arranged horizontally. None of them functions as a centre. This lack of hierarchy is deliberate. Centrality reassures; it stabilises meaning. It mirrors the logics of targeting, focus, and command that structure militarised perception. By refusing a centre, the work resists the comfort of orientation and the expectation that meaning must be anchored in a dominant object.

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A portable analogue television, Tele Star 4004, is present among the elements. Designed for terrestrial signal reception, the device no longer receives any broadcast. Its screen flickers continuously, producing electronic noise without legible image. The words UNBURY TOMORROW are handwritten directly onto the glass surface. This flicker is not an absence of image, but an image rendered unreadable. The refusal to repair or replace interrupts the familiar cycle of damage and restoration—a cycle deeply aligned with the temporal logic of war, in which destruction is followed by repair, reconciliation, and renewed violence. By remaining unresolved, the device withdraws from productivity, resolution, and narrative completion.

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Attached to the television’s telescopic antenna is a white cloth. The configuration frequently evokes the image of a flag. This reading is neither accidental nor corrected. It functions as a moment of exposure. The immediacy with which the cloth is perceived as a flag reveals how deeply perception is trained by sovereign and militarised aesthetics—how quickly fabric, elevation, and visibility are associated with territory, allegiance, and security politics. The cloth, however, is not a flag. The antenna is not a flagpole. The antenna no longer receives signals; it does not transmit messages or claim ground. It has been repurposed into a support without function or designation. In this misrecognition, viewers might encounter their own habituation to the aesthetic value of power and the visual attraction of war’s ordering forms.

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Equally present are the micro-essays, printed in Spanish, English, and Spanglish, and currently being translated into Arabic and Hebrew. These texts are made available for free circulation. They do not explain the installation. They move alongside it.

Their circulation from hand to hand, rather than from screen to screen, follows a different historical logic of transmission. Hand-to-hand circulation is slow, contingent, and relational. It depends on proximity and trust rather than speed, scalability, or control. It resists the militarised infrastructures of contemporary media, which privilege surveillance, optimisation, and algorithmic reach. The texts do not produce visibility metrics, data traces, or stable archives. Circulation here is understood as companionship rather than dissemination.

UNBURY TOMORROW does not name an alternative condition or offer a reconciliatory horizon. Instead, it opens a field of questioning:


How might perception be loosened from militarised habits of seeing?
How might language be relieved from the pressure to justify, secure, or stabilise?
How might one begin to live otherwise, without transforming uncertainty too quickly into answers?

These questions are not posed from a position of certainty. They are part of the work’s own hesitation. The installation does not instruct; it attends. It remains with the difficulty of recognition, with the unease of not knowing how interruption might look or feel.

In this sense, UNBURY TOMORROW operates as an insurrection at the level of perception—not through confrontation, but through attentiveness. An insurrection that does not overthrow, but subtly disorients; that does not declare, but circulates; that does not resolve, but stays present with the conditions that make resolution appear necessary.

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